Thursday, July 16, 2009

Karmic Consequence, Farther West Than Solitude

I hope that I never again experience the radical powerlessness of the position I have experienced and write about here. You don't need to know what this is about. I am sure you have your own...

Karmic Consequence

It was a small stone,Just one small action that tippedThe whole thing sideways.Ponderous momentSlow motion unstoppableNo damn thing to doBut get far awayFrom the kill zone beneath itAs it fell fasterAnd ever fasterUntil crashing into me, itCratered the lost groundOf my once grand life.

January 27, 2009 2:51 PM

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I am not lonely. Not really. Not ever. What is really cool, I feel like this most days, all day. I hardly have a day, even a part of a day I feel lonely. I am alone quite a bit. I am alone right now. I have no idea where my cat is. Often she is on the cooler tile in the bathroom these days. She too is okay being alone.

Further West Than Solitude

I heard you say so,Say all we have is mortal,A loneliness westOf solitude, what you said.We are the veryWords we use, there's no other.But how can I liveWith that? I have to denyThe keystone momentOf my whole entireLife to stick with you in this.

12 comments:

We are the words we use, so we need to listen closely and really hear.Sounds like that is what you did and decided you needed to move on. Being on your own and feeling okay being alone sounds pretty healthy. Lots of people cannot stand to be alone with themselves.

Techno, thanks for your comments. Yes, I believe as you do that being comfortable alone may be one measure of better mental health. However, in saying that, one must be careful of isolating as a tactic of avoidance or some other negative motive.

Michelle, that experience and surviving it is one shared feature of the ground we have in common.

Joseph, Solitude is in the West for the exact same reason the Elves withdrew from Middle Earth to the Lands Of The West.

As to having Karma fall like asteroids or whole mountains, if you have not had the experience yet you are a blessed man, may that continue to be so. My big one started in 1993 and didn't really finish until 2001. There were periods to it, but mostly it was unrelenting. Terror was never far away. There was also great joy scattered about. I did not emerge unscathed but apparently I lived. There is however some debate about that.

Interesting comment Christopher about Karma, I'm coming to know Karma, or become acquainted with it. Sometimes other peoples Karma gets mixed up with your own I think. As for being alone, and being lonely. I agree with Rick, that some of my loneliest moments have been amongst large groups of people and some of the least lonely moments of my life have been spent walking in solitude amongst the wildness of the earth.

SG, Most of the time, I think Karma is more like water for the fish and air for us. We only sort of notice it even though it almost completely encloses us. It is in this lack of attention that seems to be built in that the many illusions called Maya chiefly reside. Most of what we think of as freedom is not free, not unless we enter into disciplines of attention and succeed. Even then, we mostly navigate currents rather than freely choose novel ways to travel. To become free of these myriad entanglements is the goal of many eastern traditions.

It is rare to actually see the hugeness of a karmic issue culminate with such inevitability and reverberate, unless it is all mixed up with those events we call "acts of God". But if you do experience one, there is quite a good chance you won't understand much about it except that Karma is what this must be. It is so heavy that it can't be anything else.

The View From The Northern Wall

Some years ago my poetry took on a mythic flavor and I became a character in my own poems, a mage, "the man of the Northern Wall". This apellation is not completely fictional. My middle name is Noordwal, a Dutch term for north wall, though in current Dutch it mainly means north bank as in riverbank. I was told that an ancestor, a Portugese Jew escaping the Inquisition, settled in a small Dutch town and took this name from where he settled, near the north wall of the town. I have thought for a long time that -wal meant wall, think my mother told me that. A linguist might say that my usage is no longer common, is an older usage, but then the Inquisition happened in Portugal a few centuries ago, right around the time the Moors lost control of the Iberian Peninsula and the Jews lost the modest protection given them by Islam. Now I write as this mage, my poetry persona.